29 October 2012

Romney: Privatize FEMA, Federal Disaster Relief Spending "Immoral"

This is particularly relevant as the massive Hurricane Sandy prepares to make landfall ...

Gov. Mitt Romney was asked in a June 2011 debate about federal disaster relief funding. Romney suggested eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency, privatizing disaster relief and said it would be "'immoral" for the federal government to fund disaster relief efforts without cutting the budget elsewhere," notes Think Progress.

CNN: Governor Romney? You’ve been a chief executive of a state. I was just in Joplin, Missouri. I’ve been in Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee and other communities dealing with whether it’s the tornadoes, the flooding, and worse. FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say do it on a case-by-case basis and some people who say, you know, maybe we’re learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role. How do you deal with something like that?

ROMNEY: Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.

Instead of thinking in the federal budget, what we should cut — we should ask ourselves the opposite question. What should we keep? We should take all of what we’re doing at the federal level and say, what are the things we’re doing that we don’t have to do?

Apparently this was the "severely conservative" Mitt Romney speaking. Not sure what today's Romney Version 8.0 would say. Watch AFTER THE JUMP ...

I can see it now: People are lining up after a hurricane / earthquake / tornado / major fire, and Romney and his merry band of private entrepreneurs swoop in and say, "Sure, you can have some water. That'll be $50 bucks a gallon, please!"